RIGHT-WING historian David Irving used a "rabid
Nazi" source to authenticate an allegedly disproportionate
Jewish involvement in fraud cases in pre-Nazi Berlin, the
High Court was told last Thursday.

As his libel case against American academic Professor
Deborah Lipstadt continued, the defence pointed out
that in his biography of Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef
Goebbels, Mr Irving had written that 31,000 cases of
insurance fraud were committed by Jews in the German city in
1932. Drug-related crimes and smuggling were also held to
have been disproportionately committed by Jews.

But defence QC Richard Rampton declared that
Interpol, cited as the principal source for the statistics,
was not known as such until after the war.

He maintained that Mr Irving's real source was German
police chief Kurt Daluege, who had received a more
oblique reference in the book, and that Mr Irving had
proceeded to double the figures provided by Daluege.

Mr Rampton said that, according to official German
statistics, there were only 74 cases of insurance fraud in
the whole of the country in 1932.

During an at-times-impassioned exchange, he said to Mr
Irving: "You have effectively doubled the figures given by a
rabid Nazi.

"Assuming that it was an innocent mistake, which I don't,
then, Daluege being your source, you uncritically put it
down as fact," Mr Rampton went on.

"You have to take some kind of figures from somewhere,"
the author protested.

Continuing the attack, the QC accused Mr Irving of "a
most appalling distortion of the truth."

He denied this. "Daluege was head of the German police
system. In this particular matter, we have to rely on a
dodgy source. You have to pick and choose."

The 62-year-old plaintiff, who has conducted his own
case, also claimed that the British government invented the
idea of homicidal gas chambers in Poland in late 1941, and
that the Psychological Warfare Executive and the BBC had put
out "black propaganda" to further the story.

On being shown original documentation which the defence
said proved the gas chambers' homicidal nature, Mr Irving
termed it "low-grade evidence."

Challenged on his links with the British National Party,
Mr Irving dissociated himself from its supporters,
contemptuously dismissing them as "a band of hopeless
right-wingers going nowhere."

He also sought to distance himself from the white
supremacist American National Alliance, whose meetings he
had addressed during a nationwide tour.

Mr Irving said that he had been unaware which
organisation he had spoken to, adding that addressing its
meetings was not tantavermount to agreeing with its
views.

"When did you last address a meeting of the South Balham
Trotsky party?" Mr Rampton responded tartly.

Mr Irving is suing Professor Lipstadt and Penguin Books
over allegations that he is a Holocaust-denier who has
twisted history.

The case has been adjourned until next week, when final
statements will be delivered.

Anger over
interview

From MARGARET SAFRAN,MELBOURNE

AUSTRALIAN Jewish leaders have been
outraged by the publication of an interview with David
Irving by a woman who wrote a novel in the mid 1990s
suggesting that the Jews had brought the Holocaust on
themselves.

He comes across as an eccentric genius facing financial
ruin. In contrast, the object of his libel action, Professor
Deborah Lipstadt, is portrayed as an employee of a
"Coca-Cola university," and her historical expertise
queried.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry vice-president
Jeremy Jones has criticised the article's
publication, calling it "gimmickry of the most offensive
kind."

Miss Darville assumed a Ukrainian identity when authoring
her novel, in which Jews are said to have induced a 1930s
famine in the Ukraine in which five million died. She won a
number of literary awards before it emerged that she was in
fact an Australian of British background.

Website
note: The transcript
of the hearing referred to, Day 29 (March 2,
2000).
shows that the exchange as reported here is fictional. Mr
Irving never stated "Maybe it was a mistake." He did not
even use the word mistake at all. His full answer was
perfectly reasonable. To fax a letter to the Jewish
Chronicle: (+44) 020 7405 9040.